Master of Ceremonies;
Chairperson of the University Board;
Pro Vice- Chancellor, Prof Tyrone Pretorius;
Members of Staff;
Business Leaders;
Parents;
Students;
Ladies and gentlemen
Thank you for inviting me to address you on this special occasion to celebrate the leadership achievements of the participants in the Monash South Africa leadership programme.
On this note I wish commend Monash as a private education institution for the continued valued contribution it is making towards the development of our country.
Tonight I wish to share with you my understanding of the role of education from the vantage point of my experience in the struggle for a better human society, especially in the context of our democracy and its attendant challenges.
The approach I am about to lay out is based on a dualistic conception of education.
Firstly, it sees education as serving the developmental needs of human society for the benefit of all people. This is a materialistic aspect of education.
The second aspect of this conception sees education as serving the cognitive needs of society. This is a philosophical dimension of education.
To illustrate this approach, I wish to first cite the thought of the late Moses Kotane, one of the admirable anti-apartheid activists and a leader of both the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist party (SACP) on the function of education.
Kotane contends that: 'Proper education is a mirror in which man sees the world around him and learns to understand it - the right kind of education enables man to see what the world has been, what it is, and how it can change to suit him or his way of living.
Education can be and has been used to befuddle the minds of the common people. But education can also be used as an important instrument in the struggle for freedom and human progress. It is this kind of education which we need. We must learn geography to know the universe, that there are other countries besides our own and to know the people of different nationalities inhabiting these countries.
We must learn history to know and understand the story of man's development through the ages - the various forms of social organisation and the causes of the rise and fall of those forms of human relationships.'
From this viewpoint, I wish to start off by focusing on the developmental aspect of education.
This aspect of education is about changing material conditions of society for the better through improved social development.
In this view, education helps lift society from ignorance, backwardness and stagnation. Education also serves as a great equaliser in that it arms every person with the tools to grasp the laws that govern society and nature, thereby enabling them to harness such knowledge for their own benefit.
The aggregate effect of empowering individuals in society is that ultimately societal conditions change.
Since nations are made up of individuals, if the majority of individuals in society have access to education and acquire requisite set of skills needed by modern developmental imperatives societies change accordingly.
To this extent, education is central to human development. This is of critical importance for us in South Africa since we are faced with historical challenges that require more than government intervention to address.
Through education we create, apply, and distribute knowledge across society, resulting in the development of adaptable and globally competitive economies.
In this regard, I wish to argue that the contribution of educational institutions such as Monash will therefore assist us to tackle developmental challenges by expanding the pool of requisite skills capacity needed by our economy to realise growth, reconstruction and development.
I am confident that, both as individuals and a collective Monash's graduates will go on to help promote economic growth, national productivity and innovation.
Realising the daunting scale of challenges that our education system must address, government has been calling for partnerships with stakeholders so that together we can reverse the tide of under-development in our country.
I am confident in the contribution of Monash as a private institution of education in helping lift our society to a higher trajectory of development.
As we know, more than 925 million people around the world are starving with the majority of these found in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Asia Pacific; 30 per cent of children in developing countries (+/- 600 million) live on less than one dollar a day.
This problem is compounded by the fact that food production and security is on the decline while food prices are going up around the world.
In this regard our domestic situation fares no better. Our unemployment rates hover above 30%, with more than half of this comprising vulnerable groups such as black youth, the disabled and others.
We also have one of the highest inequalities between the rich and the poor. More worrying is the fact that close to 2.8 million young people in South Africa between ages of 18 to 24 are unemployed and not in any training or education institution.
If these challenges are not addressed urgently they represent a threat to the unity and diversity we enjoy as a country. At the end of the day people cannot enjoy unity, diversity and freedoms on hungry stomachs.
While Monash is engaged in a commendable exercise of giving its students international exposure, the institution itself may find it advisable to join hands with other public sector institutions, business and civil society to ensure that you play a role in educating and increasing the employment rate, especially amongst young people.
Through working together to mentor, educate and train the youth, we can indeed secure a humane and better-managed world.
Our efforts must be focused on improving post-schooling access to training and higher education opportunities, and in turn improving the transition from these opportunities into jobs or entrepreneurship programmes.
Education remains the bedrock upon which we can realise our development objectives and secure a better future for all.
By investing in educating the youth we are well on our way to reaching our goals of building a prosperous, united and cohesive society, and thus staking a claim in our future.
Programme director,
Having explored this materialist dimension of education, I would now like to move to the reflective dimension of education.
As I submitted earlier on, this aspect sees education as serving the cognitive needs of society.
In this conception, education serves the philosophical needs of human society. It helps us seek answers to the questions: who we are; where do we come from and where we are going? It helps clarify society's sense of identity and self.
In essence, it also assists us as humanity to clarify our purpose in life. In other words, society develops curriculum with a view to shaping the human character in keeping with its basic understanding of the afore-stated questions.
It is notable that in this conception of education, the learning process proceeds from the understanding that knowledge is not simply about skills to meet certain socio-economic requirements as stated above.
It is clearly understood that beyond the conventionally instrumentalist philosophy of education, at a deeper level knowledge should seek to lift humanity to a higher plank through enabling people to understand the world they live in.
Learning becomes more than the ability to read and write. More crucially, it becomes the duty of education to create faculties of critical consciousness in human cognition. It seeks to enable a higher conception of human experience.
Pro Vice Chancellor,
With the above in mind, I have found that listening to the presentations and reading through the testimonials about the young recipients of tonight's awards reveals their selfless commitment to helping others.
They have gone out of their way to put others first in their everyday activities.
We hope that fellow students will emulate these young people's example if they wish to continue sharing in a South Africa and Africa that is united in its diversity.
These young leaders' contributions to humanity and care for others prove that leadership cannot be achieved without the spiritual grounding to want to empathise by standing in solidarity with and eradicating the suffering of others. Without such a spiritual commitment I doubt that anyone would have the infinite strength and tenacity to continue to serve humanity.
By helping others, notwithstanding our own personal deficiencies, we thereby gain the ability to help ourselves better when the occasion arises.
I am therefore convinced that with such young individuals emerging out of our universities and schools we can rest easy knowing that our country and continent are in good hands.
I wish to congratulate all the recipients of tonight's awards and encourage them to continue striving to change their lives and that of others.
I thank you.
